Paul Nunes, Omar Abbosh, and Larry Downes are the authors of"Pivot to the Future: Discovering Value and Creating Growth in a Disrupted World."
The excerpt below illustrates how Accenture, facing disruption of its core consulting business in 2014, embarked on a massive reskilling of its workforce as part of its own strategic pivot to a"digital-first" future.The Accenture leadership team was fully on board with the need to get ahead of both big bang and compressive disruption heading our way.
Pivoting to the new would mean retraining and redeploying each and every one of our employees for a sometimes vaguely defined future, even as we asked them to dig in deeper to achieve revenue, quality, and market share gains in the present. Fortunately, Accenture is blessed to have more than 75 percent of its employees from the millennial generation, a cohort with a hunger to learn and to improve its own employability.
But sometimes altering perceptions at the field level is hard. Why? Research in human resources shows that leaders hire and promote in their own image, and that people tend to follow role models they can relate to. What's more, we all suffer from unconscious biases. And across cultures, people have different expectations for their careers at different points in their lives. All these factors make moving the lever on diversity difficult.
To combine the value of our acquisitions with our existing expertise, we also broadened the range of career paths available, successfully advancing the CEOs of some of our acquired companies into leadership roles elsewhere in Accenture.